My body has always felt like a battlefield. Growing up with undiagnosed autism meant that I felt extremely uncomfortable with numerous sensory inputs causing me to self harm from a young age. I would bite my hands, hit myself, and eventually started cutting myself to deal with the overwhelm my body was experiencing.
On top of my sensory difficulties, my body was also telling me that my assigned gender of female didn’t sit right with me. In my experience, gender wasn’t something that I thought about as a child. Childhood felt gender neutral to me, it felt free. That is until I turned about 10 years old and I got my period for the first time. I was early to develop physically and once my breasts started forming, so did an ever growing knot in my stomach. Boys and men started noticing my development and I felt a target stuck to me that I couldn’t shake off.
I started wrapping my chest so tight that I could barely breathe in hopes that my breasts wouldn’t draw attention my way. My mom knew that I did this, but there was never really a conversation around it. It was just another strange thing that the problem child was doing.
I was a big Green Day & My Chemical Romance fan in middle school and I found so much freedom in the gender fluidity of these groups. I wanted to be just like them. Growing…
